Wednesday, October 1, 2008

It is a standard plot device, often used in sitcoms,
to have two people talking to each other,
each thinking he knows what the conversation is about,
but each believing the conversation is about something
completely different than the other is thinking.
Each goes away thinking he has communicated and bases
his continued activities on that assumption, eventually
leading to a comical denouement when the truth comes out.

Unfortunately, if it happens to you, I suspect it would be much
less likely to seem funny.
I try to avoid getting into this situation by following a simple principle:
State The Obvious.
Because what is obvious to me may not be obvious to the other person.

I enjoyed a scene from the recent movie
Mama Mia
where they
took this standard plot device and turned it around,
in the scene where Harry and Bill are in the boat
discussing their recent revelations.
As an audience member, I thought I understood that each
was talking about discovering that Sophie was (as he thought) his daughter
and thinking the other was talking about something else -
only to realize at the end of the movie that perhaps they
really were each talking about what the other thought they were!
A nice little two-sided double-entendre conversation.

A professor is lecturing in a math class, writing derivations on the
board as he talks through a proof.
At one point, he says, "From here it is obvious that -"
but then he turns away from the board, saying "Just a moment."
He flips open his notebook and scribbles for a few minutes, then
turns back to the proof on the board:
"Yes, I was right, it is obvious."

As E.T. Bell
said,
"'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics."

"Obvious" is like "intuitive": not necessarily the same for different people.
Many years ago I was developing an application using the
Athena widgets
on X-Windows.
I asked one of my co-workers to try it out so that I could get some
early usability feedback.
At one point he came to a window with a scroll bar.
He had quite a bit of difficulty making the scroll bar work,
and he was getting rather annoyed.
Finally he said,
"I don't understand this scroll bar.
It's not intuitive. It's not like the Mac."
He could have decided to leave off that final part of his complaint,
where he mentioned the Mac, assuming I would understand.
Fortunately, he stated the obvious.
That made it an Aha! moment for me, because I finally
understood what people really mean when they say something
is intuitive.

Earlier this year I watched a
Mythbusters
episode in which they tested the question of whether an
airplane on a treadmill
can take off.
I thought to myself, "Well, that's a pretty stupid one, the
answer is obvious to anyone who understands any physics."
Part way through the episode Jamie made a similar comment,
saying it was one of the stupidest tests they had ever done because
the answer was obvious.
What I found rather curious was the fact that they said this was one
of the most hotly debated myths ever discussed on their web site.
Why would there be so much debate over something so obvious?
I was even more surprised when Jamie said "of course it can",
given that my thought had been "of course it can't"!
The discrepancy became clear once they
finished
the test and
their airplane took off:
Jamie and I were making different assumptions about the interpretation
of the test.
Jamie was assuming a very long treadmill, long enough that the plane
could still accelerate and move relative to the air, whereas I had
been assuming a treadmill similar in size to the plane, which would
require the plane to take off essentially from a standstill with respect
to the air.
The difference in our interpretations of the problem explained not only
why our conclusions were different,
but also explained to me why there was so much debate:
people were not sufficiently explaining their assumptions, probably because
they were "obvious", so each side ended up thinking the other side
were idiots who did not understand physics.

Although there are
some people
who like to make fun of being obvious (and I admit I enjoy their humor),
we are also reminded in
music
and
other places
to state the obvious.
It is also
culturallyimportant.
And while I agree that we should not be
required
to state the obvious, doing so can
sometimes
save us some trouble.

I believe that companies should also follow the State The Obvious
principle.
Here are a couple of statements of company policy
that I would hope would be obvious for
all companies, each of which I have seen explicitly stated
by a different large company:

Don't Be Evil.

We obey all the laws of the land.

There are many companies that abide by these principles without
explicitly stating them,
but I can think of at least one large American company with a reputation
for violating both of them.

As with the company, I also believe you should adhere to the
State The Obvious principle for your own work at the office.
For example, if you are working with your peers to select a new
vendor, product, or technology, make sure you have explicitly stated
and agreed on the requirements or selection criteria, even if they are
obvious to you.
You may think it is obvious that single-supplier lock-in is a bad thing,
but perhaps your peers do not share that position.
Once you have stated and agreed on those criteria,
you can ask your peers to justify their selections based on how those
selections support the agreed-upon criteria -
but be prepared to do the same for any selection you propose.

Of course, there is always the possibility that, once you
do State The Obvious, the other person will
refuse to accept your statement, no matter how much you
belabor it.
Or, even worse, he may try to change the situation such that your
obviously true statement is no longer true,
which could have unpleasant consequences for you
("whop").

Actually, this whole discussion should be unnecessary.
After all, it's obvious that your life will be better if you
follow the principle of State The Obvious.
Isn't it?